From Fantasy to Fact: Space-Based Laser Nearly Ready to Fly

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: December 6, 1994

IT'S back. Adored by military contractors and lambasted by civilian skeptics, fired into the political stratosphere by President Ronald Reagan and dragged back to earth by the Clinton Administration, "Star Wars" is prominent again as the newly empowered Republicans begin to push for deployment of a national system of antimissile defense and gird for ideological warfare with Democrats on the topic of placing arms in the heavens.

Surprisingly, this turn in the nation's 35-year, love-hate relationship with antimissile research finds the technology less speculative than before. For the first time, it is mature enough that one class of advanced weapons could be put into space relatively quickly, a fact that is likely to electrify this round of the antimissile debate.

The weapon is the chemical laser, which gets its energy from the combustion of fuels similar to those in rocket engines. Though much of its energy is lost as heat, significant amounts can be extracted by mirrors and resonant chambers, emerging as a concentrated beam of light that in theory can flash across space to zap speeding missiles thousands of miles away.

In particular, the new maturity centers on a chemical laser known as Alpha, which the Federal Government has quietly been developing for more than 15 years at a cost of about $1 billion. In a secluded valley near San Juan Capistrano, Calif., the sprawling test site for Alpha includes a 50-foot high chamber that mimics the vacuum of space.

Angelo M. Codevilla, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California and a former staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee who helped get Alpha started in 1978, said the device was all but ready for deployment in orbit to defend the United States.

"Like it or hate it, this is real," said Mr. Codevilla, who would like to see a dozen or so laser battle stations circling the earth. "It's not theoretical. It's not some scientist fantasizing about X-ray lasers."

But critics deride the whole idea, saying a fleet of Alpha-type weapons in orbit would violate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which was signed in 1972 by the United States and the Soviet Union and bars the deployment of antimissile arms in space. The treaty allows the orbital testing of research lasers as long as they are too weak to shoot down long-range missiles. But critics say Alpha, even as a research tool, is so powerful it would fail this legal test and violate the treaty, thus probably touching off a political storm if testing were to advance into space.

And full-blown battle stations, critics assert, are dubious since they would fail to protect the United States completely.

"It's either too much or not enough," said John E. Pike, who is in charge of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists, a private group based in Washington. Ground-based interceptors are better for knocking out short-range missiles, he said, and space lasers, at best, would be leaky shields against a concerted attack by long-range missiles.

"Imperfect defenses are worthless," Mr. Pike added, because the destructiveness of a single nuclear blast is so great.

Right or wrong, good or bad, Alpha is unique in the antimissile world by virtue of its staying power and steady evolution. It got started before the 1983 "Star Wars" speech in which President Reagan called for work on a way of rendering enemy missiles "impotent and obsolete," and it survived the program's subsequent ups and downs.

In 1993, the Clinton Administration declared Star Wars dead, in a move that was largely symbolic. Some programs were cut back, but the antimissile research is still being funded at about $3 billion a year, bringing its total cost for the decade to about $35 billion.

Alpha and allied programs, their budgets now tight, got enough money to keep evolving and growing through the rise and fall of a host of futuristic alternatives for space armaments like X-ray lasers, neutral particle beams and space-based kinetic kill vehicles. In short, Alpha is the death ray that refused to die.

"This program has survived lots and lots of turmoil because it has a very high potential payoff," said Daniel R. Wildt, an advanced systems manager at TRW Inc., Alpha's main contractor, in an interview.

The principal allure of chemical lasers is that they require no electricity, drawing their power instead from simple chemical reactions. Alpha's lasing action is produced by the combustion of hydrogen and fluorine, a toxic, corrosive, yellowish gas that is the most reactive of the elements. To avoid handling problems, the flourine is made instants before combustion in a precursor reaction of nitrogen triflouride, deuterium and helium.

Alpha got a slow start as Congress fought over its fate and allowed only limited funding for design studies. Mr. Reagan's 1983 speech opened the budgetary floodgates, and contractors broke ground for the Alpha test site in 1984.

The first full-scale ground tests of the lightweight laser began under tight security in December 1987, when gas was released into the combustion chamber but not ignited. An accident delayed the first firing until April 1989. The explosive zap came after a tense two-day countdown that required synchronization among a maze of fuel tanks, pipes, pumps, valves and switches, similar in some respects to a space-shuttle countdown.